Next demo
While waiting for the new board, Delicon has agreed to work on the text engine this week.
For the proof of concept, I'm only asking that he preload the fast queues with a fixed text message utilizing the extracted Atari 8-bit home computer font.
I have a 7-bit character kernel ready for this use. I have been so far unable to apply Supercat's advice to modifying the kernel to be 8-bit gapless. I was kinda hoping he'd do the honors for me However, I've begun finally get more familiar with the Stella debugger.
I plan on doing some cool things with the fonts. With the standard Atari font, it has lowercase letters but they don't descend. The fonts are laid out to be 8x8 (well, actually less than that because there needs to be gaps between them). But there is an OS mode that makes the lowercase characters descend properly. Doing that means extending the height of each row of text by a few scanlines and conditionally dropping the character down. I think we should be able to do this also with Chimera. Because of space considerations, text on Atari games is usually a very limited uppercase only character set. But we'll be able to support all the special characters of the Atari 8-bit with inverse video.
The end result should look somewhat similar to these two familiar Atari 8-bit graphics modes.
Just imagine them being constrained to only 12-characters and only one color setting per row, and with the usual Stellar Track flicker.
I've included the bin and source to the most advanced text kernel I have so far. It reads static FFs from ROM currently. When the queues are active, the solid blocks will be transformed with full text graphics. If some enterprising soul would like to fix the kernel to make it gapless, they get a free Chimera board. Knowing my skills, I probably won't be able to do it.
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